Charles Monaco

All the places we expected them to spend the last week of this campaign at the start of this year.

I’m not a political journalist, so was gladly surprised at the community I found here last night. To Americans anxious about the upcoming elections, a key thing we learned in Brazil that might help you: DO NOT engage with the far-right online. Don’t share rage bait. Amplify your people. Ignore them.

Let’s not forget - what just happened in Brazil is a massive L for this guy.

Once Upon a Time in Harlem is a film that every New Yorker should see — and this weekend you can, at no cost. We partnered with the filmmakers to offer free screenings this Saturday and Sunday at the Lincoln Center, Film Forum, and Magic AMC in Harlem. Go to on.nyc.gov/seeharlem to reserve a seat.

This has been one of the strangest weeks yet for Trump's health. At rally after rally, he blurted out random noises and seemed visibly confused. Now, he just posted this cryptic message:

An 87yo in WI charged 17,766 times for $77k. An 89yo in D.C. charged 26,456 times for $429k. A 76yo in CA charged 27,236 times for $578k. There are thousands of examples like these. Republicans are even worse. We shouldn't have to protect our elderly parents from this.

This is a pretty funny chart

Wall Street executives helped finance Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes for years. The Trump Administration has failed to hold them accountable. If it won’t, Congress will.

any interest I could have in AI as something cool (I have been on computer since the 80s, online since the 90s) has been swiftly eclipsed by its corporate purveyors’ strip mining of what I love (writing, reading) and how I love to do it (good labor conditions for all)

It’s a record for a midterm in Georgia: roughly 185,000 people voted in person today, on Day 1 of early voting. The prior record was set in 2022, with roughly 130,000 voters.

Elon Musk is one of the most dangerous people in the world. Twitter is a right wing propaganda tool. There are far too many folks out there pretending otherwise.

It’s important to state and restate this. These escalations based on laughable pretexts are a sign of weakness and the failure of their project. And the weaker they get the bigger swings they will take.

In 2029 Ilhan Omar will be in office as a valiant warrior and Donald Trump will either be dead as a disgraced coward, with every Republican in office distancing themselves, or alive as an even bigger quivering coward.

There is absolutely no viable path forward for this country that doesn’t hinge on extreme accountability for everyone involved in this administration. They’re going to whine about politicization and credulous media types will echo them, but the thing is, they’ve committed tons of obvious crimes!

We've been boiled frogs for so long this never gets mentioned. But this violates DOJ policies that have been in place for decades, ones that Defense Attorney Todd Blanche said should have extended for the entirety of the time his client had declared his candidacy. (Tho I think this was DHS.)

Pundit overread of 2024 as the birth of a multiracial working class movement anchored around right wing nationalism was disastrous for this country. It helped encourage lots of elite capitulation and caused libs/Dems to trim their sails. If this election buries that myth there should be a reckoning.

Okay so we have a number now: the Onion is officially 6 months ahead of reality.

New Pew poll has Trump's approval at 30% (!) 68% of the country disapproves of him. Lowest in his second term, at January 6 levels. *31%* of Trump 2024 voters now disapprove of him.

The President of the United States, in front of a crowd of his supporters, during a televised rally, admits to a Quid Pro Quo pardon, which is a felony and impeachable offence. And absolutely nothing will happen, because his party, which controls congress, are fascist collaborators and sycophants.

the tech industry is about to invent books

Tomorrow, on October 1, the biggest transfer of wealth from the working class to the wealthy hits a critical milestone. Many of the provisions from the Big Ugly Bill will go into effect, harming hundreds of thousands of Michiganders in order to create tax cuts for the richest people in America.

The collapse of support for Trump in the Rio Grande Valley is a big story of the moment. It's more deserving of our attention than what some centrist tweeted somewhere, believe it or not.

Meta is tapping "into a tax credit intended for research and experimentation. It’s an aggressive interpretation of the tax break, which Meta embraced to claim billions of dollars in tax credits for data center expansion."

Just helping with editing here. These bots aren’t sentient. They’re doing what they’re programmed to do. OpenAI, a private company supposedly bound by laws, committed federal crimes.

it’s genuinely fascinating how establishment democratic politics in big cities has become so ossified and incompetent that they’ve created a huge lane for the left to embrace good government reforms and build a broad coalition of socialists and technocrats

You used to be able to start a war and get popular from it in this country

Trump is raging at news orgs for refusing to cover his reception of Xi after he banned three from the White House. The real lesson here: When institutions join together to resist his abuses of power it actually works, sending him into a helpless fury. New from me: newrepublic.com/article/2158...

You used to be able to start a war and get popular from it in this country

Trump’s hissy fit over White House press passes is a signal of what to expect during his lame -duck period: petty, self-defeating chaos

I had plenty of uncertainty about what was to come when Trump won a second term but I had no doubt at all that he’d be wildly unpopular as soon as he reminded the American people who he was.

A lot of comparisons to 2018 and 2006 going around. Or 2010 or 1994. Might be time to start looking at 1974.

Recursive self-degradation

According to the Swan/Haberman book, Trump became an evangelist for AI after someone used ChatGPT to turn one of his executive orders into a poem.

Someone check on Slovenian TLD owners

The least popular U.S. war ever, with room to decline further

Trump is popular with people he himself finds repulsive and contemptible; Mamdani is popular with the people whose approval Trump has always craved.

Related to the Two Brains news, saying computers can do human level thinking requires understanding how our own minds and bodies work and that remains an incredibly open frontier of discovery.

Portrait of a community fundamentally premised on the abrogation of consent

among other things, this is disqualifying for his inevitable potus run. if you won’t stand up to the billionaires and you can’t tell when they’re lying (which is always), you’re no better than what we have now.

The Sixths need to play all of Hyacinths And Thistles here

"In past conflicts, preparing lists of proposed targets — work that includes assessing how they align with an operation’s objectives — had taken hours for staffers to complete. Ahead of the US attack on Iran, much of that work was condensed into several minutes via Maven," a Palantir AI system.

This is the type of AI disaster scenario that I ACTUALLY worry about. (1) AI industry oversells the capabilities of its products to score fat government contracts. (2) govt puts the AI in charge of critical shit. (3) AI fucks up, because it has a nonzero error rate. (4) shit, now we’re at war.

New email from @aoc.bsky.social to her list with some of her most expansive comments yet on AI: "Silicon Valley billionaires want us to believe that AI robots will destroy humanity. But the biggest threat to humanity are the tech oligarchs themselves."

With reference to scholars who have been following them for some time, Nathalie Maréchal traces how ideas such as transhumanism, longtermism, and effective altruism converge into "the AI cult,” and why she thinks policymakers and the public can't afford to ignore it.